Professor Jae Young Kim received his B.S. in Urban Engineering and M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Seoul National University and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison for research on hazardous-material transport near landfills. After working as a researcher at Wisconsin, he joined Seoul National University in 1996. He has served leading engineering and waste-management organizations in Korea and abroad. In 2025 he took leave from the university to lead the HMG Construction Technology Research Institute, the integrated R&D organization of Hyundai E&C and Hyundai Engineering, and in 2026 he became President of the Korean Academy of Environmental Sciences.

His laboratory's work has expanded from organic-waste resource recovery to greenhouse-gas inventories and monitoring of particulate matter and air pollutants. Research topics include biogas production from food waste, landfill design and groundwater contamination, greenhouse-gas prediction, leachate treatment, trace contaminants in biogas facilities, UAV-based landfill-emission measurement, agricultural-residue biochar, urban particulate-source tracking, advanced waste-derived environmental materials, and statistical prediction and management of disaster waste.